B.F. Skinner

Burrhus Frederic Skinner (20 March 1904-18 August 1990) was an American psychologist, behaviorist, author, inventor, and social philosopher who was considered, along with John B. Watson, to be a pioneer of behaviorism.

Biography
Burrhus Frederic Skinner was born in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania in 1904, and he became an atheist and an intellectual at a young age; he was accepted to Hamilton College, but criticized its religious mores due to his atheism. After receiving his PhD from Harvard in 1931, he worked there as a researcher, and he became a professor during the 1940s. From 1958 to 1974, he was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard, and he famously pioneered behaviorism after reading John B. Watson's works. He believed that free will was an illusion and that human action was dependent on the consequences of previous actions. Therefore, his experiments involved operant conditioning, including his "Skinner Box" experiment, in which a mouse would learn to press a lever in exchange for food, and would become accustomed to this process. He published 21 books and 180 articles during his career, and he died in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1990.